Rep. Jeff Miller of Florida just made perhaps the most powerfully stupid set of remarks I have ever heard from an elected official. Is he actually this dumb or is he just doing this for the money and power he gets in return?

MSNBC host Richard Lui had asked Miller if he thought messaging against man-made climate change would be detrimental to Republicans’ 2014 and 2016 election prospects. Lui cited a poll of Florida voters who said that on the issue of climate change they trusted scientists over Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who does not believe human activity contributes to global warming, by a margin of 56 to 33 percent.

“Well, I think anybody would answer a poll and say that they believe the scientists, but you have to understand that it is not settled science,” Miller said. “The issue of climate change has been happening for a long time, and for us to be able to think that we, as matter of fact, can change what’s going on right now to any substantive measure is really kind of foolish in my opinion.”

At this point, I only had questions. If 97% of climate scientists agree on something and the other three are on Exxon/Mobil’s payroll, can’t we call the science “settled”? The “issue of climate change” has been happening? Is he denying that climate change is occurring or only arguing that we can’t do anything about it?

Mr. Lui tried to get some clarification.

“So you agree that it is changing?” Lui asked.

“I’ve never said that it wasn’t changing,” Miller responded.

“To a deleterious effect?” Lui asked.

“It changes. It gets hot, it gets cold, it’s done it for as long as we’ve measured the climate,” Miller said.

Okay, so he agrees that the climate is changing, but not necessarily with a deleterious effect. I am going to assume that he was confounded by Liu’s polysyllabic stylings.

“But, manmade, isn’t that the question?” Lui pressed.

“Then why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Were there men that were causing — were there cars running around at that point that were causing global warming? No,” Miller concluded. “The climate has changed since Earth was created.”

Logic…how does it work?

Rep. Miller just said that burning fossil fuels cannot cause deleterious climate change because burning fossil fuels had nothing to do with the dinosaurs going extinct. Here we get to another topic that seems settled in the scientific community. The dinosaurs died after a giant asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula.

Effects of the Asteroid Impact
The devastation caused by such an event is difficult to imagine. The asteroid would have hit with the force of 100,000 billion tons of TNT. This would have generated an earthquake one thousand times greater than the largest ever recorded, with winds of over 400 kph. A massive fireball would have boiled nearby seas, destroying everything for thousands of kilometers. Forests throughout most of North America and some of South America would have been flattened by the shock wave. Evidence of a giant tsunami has been found around the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, as well as in Spain and Brazil. It may have had an effect as far away as New Zealand. Map showing asteroid impact in Gulf of Mexico
Despite the enormity of the destruction from the initial impact, the dinosaurs and their contemporaries might have survived and eventually recovered, but the subsequent long-term effects of the blast were even more deadly. Ninety thousand cubic kilometers of debris would have been blasted into the atmosphere, some reaching into space only to re-enter at high speeds. This could have heated the atmosphere sufficiently to ignite global forest fires. While the heavier pieces of ejecta settled back down on Earth, fine dust particles would have remained in the atmosphere and significantly blocked sunlight, causing an effect called an “impact winter”. There is much debate about the duration and severity of the impact winter following the K/T impact, but the darkness and cold temperatures might have reduced photosynthesis and collapsed food chains globally.

The amount of carbon and sulfur contained in the rock at the impact site would have aggravated these devastating effects. As much as 100 billion tons of sulfur and 10 trillion tons of carbon would have been vaporized by the impact and blown into the atmosphere. The resulting sulfate aerosols would have stayed in the atmosphere for several years; the resulting carbon dioxide would have stayed airborne for several hundred years. Initially the sulfate aerosols would have contributed to global cooling by blocking out the sun, before precipitating as acid rain. After the dust and sulfates settled out and ended the cooling, global warming would have begun. The carbon dioxide levels, being two to three times normal, would have caused extreme greenhouse conditions, raising global temperatures by as much as 10°C. Although some life forms may have survived the years of darkness and freezing temperatures, many surely died out in the subsequent centuries of heat.

That doesn’t mean that every single paleontologist agrees with the asteroid theory, but Exxon/Mobil doesn’t have a compelling reason to pay for alternate theories and theorists. Rep. Jeff Miller may have some explanation, but at least we are agreed that cars were not involved.

But let’s think about this for a minute. We’re concerned about climate change for two reasons. The first is that rising sea levels and more powerful storms and droughts and forest fires are hugely expensive things to deal with. The second is that we don’t want to cause even more massive extinctions than we’ve already accomplished, and that extends in particular to our own species.

So, if we’re worried that we’re going to cause our own extinction, the argument that climate change caused the dinosaurs to go extinct seems like about the worst available argument that you could make. Rep. Jeff Miller is just proving our point.

God, what a ridiculous man he is. I hope the people in Florida’s panhandle are proud of their idiot.